Page 27 of That Defining Moment

“Cassian, hey.” He set the box on the table and leaned back, one arm draped over the back of Cassian’s chair. “Who’s your friend? Is this Elisa?”

Cassian’s tongue flicked out and swept across his lower lip. His eyes, which had been wide and glassy when Lysander sat down, dropped to the table and stayed there. It looked like he was going to say yes, his mouth already shaping the word, the lie forming with the ease of someone who’d spent his entire life giving the answer that would cause the least upset.

“This is Uriel, not Elisa,” he said carefully. “He’s a friend of mine.”

Uriel. Like ‘Cassian’, it was an archaic name that belonged to someone whose parents might think it was a good idea to fuck off to the Dandenongs and disappear into a commune.

“Good to meet you, mate.” Lysander extended his hand across the table.

Uriel looked at it. His whole body drew back from Lysander, his shoulders pulling inward. He looked at Lysander’s outstretched fingers as though he were weighing up whether whatever contamination Lysander had on him might transfer through skin.

Lysander withdrew his hand and let it settle on the back of Cassian’s chair, his fingers close enough to Cassian’s shoulder that the proximity was a statement.

“How do you two know each other?” Lysander asked, and the question was directed at Uriel, not at Cassian, because he wanted to watch this big alpha construct a response and see how polished it came out.

“We grew up together,” Uriel said plainly. “Cassian and I go back a very long way.”

“Grew up together where?”

Uriel’s eyes held Lysander’s without a flicker. “In the community.”

Lysander turned to Cassian. The younger omega’s hands were wrapped around a mug of tea, his knuckles gone white, and he was looking at Lysander with an expression that was a strange blend of defiance and a plea for understanding.

“We’re leaving, Cass.” Lysander’s voice was stripped of the warmth he’d learned to wrap around Cassian over the past weeks. “Get up.”

“Lysander —”

“Now.”

Lysander stood and positioned himself between the two of them, his back to Uriel. He could feel the alpha’s gaze on the back of his neck like a physical grip.

“Cassian is always safe with me. The Light has blessed him and declared him a Calyx,” Uriel said so softly that Lysander had to strain to hear him. “It’s an alpha’s imperative to shelter his omegas from harm. Cassian has been under my protection since long before he was under yours.”

“His omegas.” Lysander let the plural sit there for a second. “He’s not yours.”

“He belongs to the Light.”

“He belongs to himself, you absolute fucking headcase.” Lysander reached down and wrapped his hand around Cassian’s wrist, right over the ridge of scar tissue, and pulled. “Cassian. We are fucking leaving.”

He hauled Cassian up from the chair firmly enough that he stumbled forward into Lysander’s chest. He steered Cassian past the counter, leaving the pastries on the table.

Lysander kept hold of Cassian and walked fast, cutting left towards Lygon Street, even as he checked over his shoulder every few strides to make sure that the alpha wasn’t following them.

Cassian was crying so hard that he could barely keep his feet under him.

“He’s not — you don’t understand, Lysander, he’s not like that, he’s not what you think.” The words came out in wet, gulping bursts between sobs that shook his whole frame, drawing stares from a couple coming out of the Vietnamese grocer. “He’s the gentlest person I’ve ever known. He used to bring me water after the planting days without me asking him to, and his hands…he has such beautiful hands! You don’t know. You don’t understand.”

“Keep walking, Cass.”

“And the way he says my name, it’s not like how anyone else says it, it’s like the word was made for his mouth to hold, and when I was fourteen, I smelled him across the table and I knew, I just knew —”

Lysander tightened his hold on Cassian and steered him around a bin that Cassian would have walked straight into. A man waiting at the tram stop stared openly at the blond omega stumbling down the footpath in tears, and Lysander stared back until the man found something else to look at.

“He has a beautiful soul.” Cassian’s voice cracked on the last word. “He wouldn’t hurt me. He’s never once hurt me. The Light pours through him, Lysander, and when I’m near him I can feel it in my chest like a second heartbeat, and you pulled me away from him —”

“Yes, I did.”

“He came all this way to find me, which means the Universe sent him, because the Universe doesn’t make mistakes, and if you’d just sat down and talked to him properly you’d have seen it too, you’d have felt his warmth, his gentleness, the way he holds everything so carefully in his beautiful hands…”